"The Business Day" Highlights at Future Decoded 2015

When Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella took charge of Microsoft in 2014, many pundits claimed that his ‘cloud-first, mobile-first’ mantra was little more than that. Ships the size of Microsoft turn very slowly and so the odds of Nadella transforming his company at the necessary pace were slim at best.

Yet despite the overwhelming odds, Microsoft is one of the few old-guard technology firms to successfully make the transition. In less than two years, the firm has managed to transform itself into one of the dominant cloud players, offering Office 365 - Microsoft’s fastest growing business to date, and Azure.

What makes me unique?

Future Decoded is a unique event hosted by Microsoft, that explores the social, economic and technological impact of the digital revolution. Speaking at the event in London yesterday, Nadella posed a rhetorical, yet hugely poignant question.

“The question we need to ask is what do we do uniquely in this mobile first, cloud first world?”

He was, of course, asking the question of his own company, but it’s one that we should all be asking of ourselves and of our businesses. Where is our value add? What is it that we bring to the table?

It was a theme that was mirrored by many of the speakers at today’s event. Lord Sebastian Coe, the man responsible for organising arguably one of the most operationally complex events in British history – the London Olympics - spoke of the public negativity that the bid faced in the preliminary stages of the process. He said it was only by waking up every morning and tackling the question, “Why are we doing this?” that his team was able to externalise the reason for the campaign to the outside world. The net result? Debatably the greatest games in modern Olympic history.

In rapidly evolving sectors like technology you will often find that your value add must evolve too. What you brought to the table yesterday might not necessarily be enough to win you a seat tomorrow. It’s a dog eat dog world and those that provide value to their customers through innovative and unique solutions will survive.

At Cobweb, we wake up every morning and ask what it is we can do to evolve our value add for our customers and partners.

That’s why today we launched our new ‘cloud reseller in a box’ campaign. As we move into this cloud first, mobile first world, resellers are frantically working to reposition their value add. Cobweb has now combined the world’s best of breed services from vendors, such as Microsoft, into a streamlined bundle for resellers.

Channel partners can integrate a range of industry-leading solutions into their portfolios, retaining complete control of everything, from support to billing.

“Cobweb’s integration capability provides partners with sector specific solutions, allowing companies, big and small, to seize new opportunities with cloud power,” explained Ash Patel, Director of Business Transformation at Cobweb. “Additionally we’re able to give partners a Go to Market as a service that other businesses would struggle to achieve on their own.”

In business, it’s all too easy to maintain the status quo, to push forward, ignoring what’s in our periphery. Today, we were all reminded that our industry is changing at break-neck pace and the status quo no longer deserves a place in business. Take a moment to ask yourself, what is it that my company does uniquely? What do we bring to the table?